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February 28, 2007

The House of Mirth: Review

Ecclesiastes 7:4: "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth."

The House of Mirth is a novel of New York society manners. The heroine is Lily Bart an impoverished socialite who lives off a small inheritance and her Aunt Julia’s generosity. She travels the inner circle of the New York elite by being charming and beautiful; something she finds increasingly more difficult the older she gets. There is a price to pay, when living off the rich. Lily has to be lively and entertaining, even when she doesn’t feel up to it.

Lily has had many opportunities to marry and have the life she was "trained" to have. She always seems to throw them away. Her friend Carry says she manages "to be off on a picnic" when opportunity presents itself. The fact is Lily doesn’t really want that life: the loveless lives her friends have. She’s really in love with Lawrence Seldon, a lawyer from a good family, who lives just on the outside of society. He looks down on the lifestyle of these people and feels that Lily shouldn’t really be one of them. Although it’s he that she loves, she can never really let go of the material things she’d miss if she married him.

Lily finds herself, through a bad investment, in the middle of a scandal. Try as she might, she only gets in deeper, mired in the mud with social climbers, adulterers, and false friends. Lily knows that only the richest can come out of it clean. She has to decide what is truly important to her: money or her morals.

This is a re-read for me. I read this last winter and this time around with my book club. I loved the way Wharton writes. It’s rich and descriptive. You can almost feel the silk of Lily’s dress. She’s as good at describing a New York drawing room as she is the worries and thoughts running through Lily’s mind. Wharton is brutally honest and hard on New York society, of which she herself was born into.

I have yet to read more of Edith Wharton, but I’m sure I will in the future.

I agree with Wendy. I was exposed to Wharton in 06 and 05, and there is something about her prose that's very accessible. So I highly rec Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome as well. The latter is very short and different than the other two in setting, but still intriguing.

I agree with Chris. He analyzes it very well. Taking into account the ignorance women were kept in at the time, Lilly's education, her mother's blind love and Lily's natural tendencies for an easy life, her taste for beautiful material things, reinforced by her reluctance to face things the way they are, it was inevitable she would fall prey to uncrupulous people like Gus. She was frivolous and did not have any one to give her sound advice, or she did not listen to them. But what redeems her is her honesty.

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